On one hand, this novel is a necessary war cry against the exploitation of labour, a rightfully angry and anger-inducing description the working and living conditions of the newly industrialized world,  a brilliant historical resource on miner strikes of the 1860s (written with all the hindsight of the 1880s), and a roiling mess of hunger, hope, and misery rendered in strikingly powerful prose.

On the other hand, if I ever have to read another young woman's breasts described as 'warlike', I'm quitting fiction altogether.

That was a joking example, but do be warned of some of the misogyny in this book. And I don't mean the period-typical attitudes of the miners towards their wives. I mean the way Zola repeatedly chooses to describe women's bodies in the narration and how he writes their emotions and choices (culminating in a frankly ridiculous scene with the main female character near the very end).

To sum it up: this book is brilliant, beautiful, miserable, furious, hopeful, aggravatingly patriarchal, and despite all its flaws eternally necessary.